Examining the levels of scientific cooperation among Iranian researchers and its relationship with receiving citations

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the scientific cooperation in the published articles of Iranian researchers at various levels of international, national, intra-institutional cooperation, and single authorship in the Scopus database.
Method: This research is quantitative and descriptive, utilizing a scientometric approach. The research data comprises all scientific publications by Iranian researchers extracted from the SciVal database over a ten-year period (2014-2023). Exponential regression was employed to examine growth trends, while simple linear regression was used to assess the impact of scientific collaboration. These analyses were conducted using SPSS software and Excel.
Findings: Data analysis reveals that between 2014 and 2023, 635,821 documents were published in journals indexed in the Scopus database, with at least one author affiliated with an organization in Iran. These documents garnered a total of 9,533,322 citations. A review of these scientific publications indicated that 27.4% were produced in collaboration with international researchers, 32.5% with national researchers, 35.6% with researchers from the same institute, and 4.6% were individual works. In comparison, the global distribution is 20.1%, 33.7%, 30.6%, and 15.6%, respectively. Iranian researchers received an average of 22.5 citations per article from international sources, ranking 22nd globally. For articles with national collaboration, Iran received 12.7 citations per article, compared to the global average of 13.9. Articles involving institutional collaboration received 12.1 citations in Iran, while the global average was 11.1. Single-author articles in Iran received 8.8 citations, whereas the global average was 4.5. The domain-weighted citation impact for Iran's scientific productions was 1.66 for international cooperation, 0.84 for national collaboration, 0.79 for institutional collaboration, and 0.69 for single authorship. The global figures were 1.52, 1.01, 0.85, and 0.59, respectively. The highest scientific cooperation was observed with researchers from the United States, followed by Canada and Great Britain. The growth rate of Iranian scientific productions in collaboration with international researchers was 7.56%, while national cooperation, intra-institutional collaboration, and single authorship experienced negative growth rates of 1.5%, 3.4%, and 5.7%, respectively. The citation process exhibited a declining trend, with negative growth rates of 1.72%, 1.97%, 1.97%, and 1.88% at the international, national, intra-institutional, and single authorship levels, respectively. The weighted citation impact index for Iranian researchers showed growth rates of 1.44%, 0.07%, 0.035%, and -0.08% for international cooperation, national collaboration, institutional collaboration, and single authorship, respectively. The regression model highlighted the relationship and impact of international cooperation on article citations.
Conclusion: Compared to the levels of scientific cooperation in articles published worldwide, the articles by Iranian researchers have a suitable and similar status. Scientific cooperation at various levels, particularly on an international scale, results in more citations.